“Where to?”
“I’m heading for home. You know where I hang out. Send him there and I’ll see him.”
“I’ll do it,” Moll quickly nodded. “He’ll show up within an hour.”
“All right! I’ll be there.”
The women parted with as little ceremony as they had met.
“Goulard, eh?” thought Nick, having heard every word that passed between the couple. “Goulard, eh? If he shows up before I do, Miss Sadie Badger, he’ll go some. This is too good an opportunity to lose.”
The conversation between the two women had transpired in a very few minutes. The significance of it, in view of what Nick had learned and suspected, convinced him not only that he was on the right track, but also that the work he had laid out for himself and his two assistants before leaving the Mantell residence, the nature of which will appear, was likely to prove successful.
No one had noticed him in the barroom doorway, and Nick presently slipped out and started in pursuit of Sadie Badger.
“She is not acquainted with Goulard, and probably does not know him by sight,” he rightly reasoned from what[Pg 23] he had overheard. “If I have sized up the evidence correctly, then, I probably can worm out of her precisely what took place in the Manhattanville house, and possibly learn what became of Padillo and his war prize. I’ll wager I have it near enough to pull wool over the woman’s eyes and loosen her tongue. I’ll take the chance, at all events, regardless of the consequences.”
Nick had no difficulty in overtaking Sadie Badger nor in trailing her to her destination.